A population is a group or set of individuals, organisms, or items that share at least one common characteristic and are considered as a whole for study or analysis. The exact meaning depends on the context:
- In general terms , a population refers to all the people living in a particular area or region, such as a city, country, or the world
- In biology and ecology , a population is a group of organisms of the same species that live in the same place at the same time and can interbreed
. It is a subset of a species occupying a specific geographic area, with characteristics such as size and density important for survival and reproduction
- In statistics , a population is the entire set of items or events from which data can be collected and analyzed. It can be any complete group sharing a common feature, such as all the daisies in a country or all the customers of a business. Because studying an entire population is often impractical, samples (smaller subsets) are used to make inferences about the population
Thus, a population can mean a group of humans, animals, plants, or even objects, depending on the field of study, but fundamentally it denotes a complete group with shared characteristics that is the focus of observation or analysis
Summary of Definitions by Field
Context| Definition
---|---
General| All people living in a specific area or region
Biology| Group of interbreeding organisms of one species living together in
the same place and time
Statistics| Entire set of items or events from which a sample can be drawn for
data analysis
Ecology| Dynamic group of individuals of the same species affected by
environmental factors
This broad applicability makes "population" a foundational concept in multiple disciplines
